Putting my CD collection onto HD

Magic_x_uk

Magic_x_uk

Magic_x_uk

Soldato
Joined
11 Oct 2005
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Derbyshire
Hi folks, want to ask a quickie,

I have about 170 - 200 Cd's and i want to put them all on to my computer. I need to buy a hard drive just for this (not sure GB for that amount of cd's) ?

Anyhow. Whats the best way of putting all my collection onto the computer. Will i have to type in each track name and album name or ??

What program is best so i can basically put my music cd into my computer and save it on there.

I want to do this so eventually when i get my back side into gear and buy a mp3 player all will be ready for me.
 
Shouldnt be too bad at all on disk usage, I think you would be looking at around 15 albums per gig (at 192kps encoding, average of 45 minutes an album) so even a 20 gig drive should cover your collection and then some...unless my maths is bad?
Most of the ripping programs use something called FreeDB which basically take the unique cd information (number of tracks, track length etc) which it uses to perform a lookup on a internet database of all cds submitted. This then gets the artist, album, song, genre etc from freedb and populates the tags of the MP3 file created by the ripping software 99% of the time it finds the correct cd information minimizing the amount of manual work you will need to do.
There are plenty of programs to do this with, see here http://www.mp3-converter.com/mp3_converter_freeware.htm and try a couple out which suit your tastes really (I use CDEX myself) they vary mainly in GUI design and speed IMO.
 
Ive got 1000 songs taking up 4GB of space, mostly encoded at 128kps. Dont know whether thats any use to you for guess work.

Id probably say play safe and buy a 30GB drive, but it depends on what codec you want to use and how many songs you actually have.
 
well 99% of my cd's are all original so this freedb should be usefull ( i think its sometimes called cddb)?

Anyhow, thanks for the idea of how much disk space i need. OcUK have some good offers on HD this week so may buy one of those spinpoint's as i hear they are quite quiet.

Now the program i need but to be honest im still a bit confused.

I just put a original CD into my computer and tried Windows Media player under the RIP setting and it ripped it in windows media audio not mp3

I want a program where i can put a disk in and it ripps it to my chosen destination into the file format i want.

Which will be mp3.

is that what winamp does then ?

just need a program that will sort this out.
 
Musicmatch Jukebox will rip them all for you, either to MP3 up to 320kbps or VBR. The free version is limited in ripping speed though. Sonicstage does it too but without the speed restriction.

As for typing in names, both those apps use an online database to find track/album/artist names for you.

Rip at 192 kbps at least btw. A CD at 192 kbps is about 60-70 MB, and if you wanted to use 320 kbps, about 100-120 MB. So that would come out at somewhere between 14-25 GB very roughly if I've done my maths right, so any new drive will do.
 
Been using CDex for a hour now and seeing how that goes, i dont understand this kbps thing. My default on Cdex it appears under options to do it at 128 kbps, with encoder option at MPEG 1, although i do have the option of MPEG II or MPEG II.5

also it is clicked, under LAME encoder MP3 version


what is the advantage in higher kbps then ? i take it it is better sound quality then ? I am now trying at 192 kbps

Must admit, so far, CDex seems to be doing the job fine for me at the moment
 
Musicmatch to be honest. iTunes is too proprietary. Musicmatch will allow you to specifiy the home location for all the music, you can set the encoding rate which it will then remember, it picks up the titles from the same place as all the others, it supports easy re-tagging if the central database is wrong (way too frequent in my experience!), easy creation of playlists and it has an AutoDJ for when you just want it to choose what you hear.

Also, get the hard disk an external USB2 case and then you can just move the music with you easily.
 
If sound quality is important to you, and you're not worried about playing the ripped files on anything other than your pc and an ipod then you should consider using AAC format instead of MP3. In fact I think iTunes uses AAC compression by default. Certainly when you buy songs from the iTunes store they arrive as 128kbps AAC.

One thing to note if you decide to stay with MP3 instead is definitely NOT to use iTunes to rip your music. It's MP3 encoder is reportedly not of high quality. Conversely it's AAC encoder is supposedly one of the best.

One popular set up a lot of people (judging by the ilounge forums) are now using is AAC at 192kbps with Variable Bit Rate turned on. Variable bit rate reduces the bit rate during uncomplicated musical passages where for example few instruments are playing few notes, and increases it during complex passages. The result is slightly higher quality of sound for roughly the same file space.
 
Personally i rip my CD's with Exact Audio Copy and then encode them with Ogg quality 8.

However if I wanted to do that many, i would just use dBPowerAMP to rip from cd to Ogg and get freeDB stuff sorted for u at the same time :)
 
I couldnt get lame working for love nor money (it refused to find any track info)

I currently use iTunes to burn mp3's at 192kbps and they sound great - certainly as good as WMP10
 
I use Exact Audio Copy, get track names of FreeDB iirc then encode in OGG (used to do FLAC > Ogg and MP3 (different MP3 players) but also hae it automatically create directories/subdirectories then tag the ogg files :)
 
I would also recommend OGG, generally sounds a lot better than MP3. Try 128kps VBR OGG versus 128kps VBR MP3, it is pretty obvious. Use 192kps OGG, you don't want to re-rip again (or you could store all as lossless FLAC then encode to whatever you like later on)
 
If you have a Creative X-Fi card you can always use the "Super Rip" function, giving you the clearest sound, although not sure how much space that would take up per album
 
I use Exact Audio Copy (came highly recommended by a few friends) with LAME, at 192kbps. A 10 track album takes up about 70mb?

Obviously that's a very roough guide as every album is different, length of tracks etc..
 
I use EAC + FLAC. I don't have a problem spending £90 (probably £70 now) on a HD dedicated to my music.

When I need MP3/Ogg/whatever for portable use, I use Foobar to transcode them. Easily done.
 
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